Mark Osborne’s More

Mike Plante, Short Film Programmer

We are proud to share one of the more celebrated shorts of recent times – More, directed by Mark Osborne. This lovingly animated stop-motion tale of an inventor’s search for bliss and meaning in a dehumanizing universe of mass consumption won the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. Going beyond a great animation style, the short has an incredible level of humanism and the ability to take you into the story. More took more than nine months to film and was the first short ever shot in the IMAX format. And yes, that is music by New Order that you hear in the film. Though a popular fixture online in the early days of short film websites, the time has come to bring this powerful story back today, where it’s still so strikingly relevant.

And here is our own iron man. Jake Mahaffy has been carving out a niche on the fringe of filmmaking for some time now, with the excellent character treatise Wellness, a favorite of the underground festival circuit, and the rustic, powerful New Frontier feature War (2004 Festival). A Sundance Institute Lab Fellow and multi-year Festival alum, this is one of a series of short films studying the effects and implications of motion in controlled environments, practical illustrations of basic concepts of physics – and of course with a deeper meaning that Mahaffy always touches on. In Motion Studies: Inertia, a man runs as hard and as long as he can in a full suit of Middle Age armor, with the result all at once hilarious and transcendent. Check out the complete collection of shorts in the YouTube Screening Room here.